Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (6 page)

The ocean constituted a web of trade routes. It vaguely resembled what our world of today increasingly looks like with its commercial and cultural interlinkages. Because the Indian Ocean is the sum of its parts,
broken up as it is into subunits—the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and so forth—the “natural condition” was for “several locally hegemonic powers to coexist,” writes Abu-Lughod.
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The ocean was neutral, in other words. No one state power dominated, certainly not any kingdom in Europe.

In the medieval centuries, Western hegemony still lay in the future; just as today, American naval hegemony, to the degree that it exists—the last phase of the rule of the West across these seas—may, as the years and decades advance, lie increasingly in the past.

I
n 1907, soon after his return to England from India as viceroy, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon delivered the annual Romanes Lecture at Oxford. The subject he chose was “Frontiers,” of which he had a lifetime of experience, first as a younger man traveling along the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia, and later as a diplomat involved in determining the empire’s borders in Turkestan.
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Curzon spoke about every kind of natural frontier: seas, deserts, mountains, rivers, and forests; and every kind of man-made one: walls and ramparts, straight astronomical lines on a map, marchlands, buffer states, protectorates, hinterlands, and spheres of influence. He named seas and secondly deserts as the most “uncompromising” and “effective” of frontiers, noting that England lost America, Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines, Napoleon lost Egypt, and the Dutch and Portuguese lost their coastal empires in Asia all, ultimately, because of the “interposition” of seas. As for deserts, he pointed out that the Gobi Desert protected China to its northwest, Bukhara and Samarkand were “shielded by the sandhills of the Kara Kum,” the Middle East was for long periods relatively cut off from India by the “broad wastes” of Persia and Turkestan, and black Africa cut off from the rest of civilization by the Sahara to its north.
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Of course, seas could be navigated and deserts spanned by railroad and camel caravans, and Curzon listed numerous examples of this. Indeed, the ways in which seas separate humanity are obvious. It is the ways in which they connect civilizations that are crucially revealing, particularly when assessing such a strategic and crowded arena as the Indian Ocean. The same
holds true for deserts, which are much more than just impassable frontiers, even without railways, Curzon’s reasoning to the contrary. The effect of deserts on the destiny of nations is more subtle than that of oceans; after all, it was not only the existence of a desert to the east of Mesopotamia that formed a barrier between the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent, it was also a matter of different cultures and languages or dialects, which arose because of numerous factors, not all of them geographical. Moreover, we should not exaggerate this kind of barrier, for history is full of Arab and Persian migrations across deserts. The desert stretching from Syria south into peninsular Arabia may have proved to be even less of a divider of peoples, as Arabic is spoken throughout. This north-south Arabian desert has been traversed by tribes and roving bands that intimately have affected the destinies of all the areas through which they have passed.

Hence, we have the story of Oman, a microcosm of the world of the western Indian Ocean, because, like other places on and near the Arabian Sea—Somalia, the Gulf sheikhdoms, the provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh in Pakistan, and the northwestern Indian province of Gujarat—Oman constitutes a vibrant albeit thin band of humanity existing between sea and desert, subject to the immense influences of both.

Oman is sort of an island; albeit not literally. Reversing in this case Curzon’s neat order of interposition, the desert has been even more of a frontier in Oman’s history than the sea. Because of the predictability of the winds, thousands of miles of open ocean not only did not separate Oman from the pathways of humankind, but indeed brought it closer to its neighbors, even as more than a thousand miles of open desert to the north kept it isolated by land. From the sea has come cosmopolitanism; from the desert isolation and tribal conflict. Because seafaring communities have existed for more than two thousand years here, Oman, in the manner of Yemen, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, constitutes an age-old cluster of civilization. Oman is not a relatively recent creation of history like the Gulf sheikhdoms, which came about mainly because they lay along the Indian Ocean trade and communications route of Great Britain, the nineteenth century’s greatest maritime power: “Petty Arab chiefships” is what Curzon called the Gulf states, “established in order to prevent slave-raiding on the adjoining seas.”
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Nor is Oman the product of a family in the twentieth century like Saudi Arabia. Oman’s ruling dynasty, the Al Bu Sa‘ids, have been in power longer than the United States has been a
country. Yet, despite its longevity, the animosity of the tribes in the desert have kept the Omani state weak or nonexistent for long periods, often resulting in domination by the most proximate great power, Iran. The sea, its winds, and good harbors have provided the foundation for a venerable state, whereas the desert has often come close to destroying it.

Oman, it is said, is the land of five hundred forts. In fact, I traveled from one Arab
qasr
(fort) to another in the desert that lurks just behind the deepwater harbors, a landscape kneaded over the eons by the wind and seismic disruptions into excruciating and beautiful forms. Each fort boasts a clean, mathematical singularity, towering over twisted hilltops and naked precipices. But it is the repetition that is instructive. As appealing as the museum restorers try to make them—decorating the rooms with carpets, porcelain, native jewelry, old pictures, and lovely latticework—the very number of these stone and mud edifices demonstrates the lawlessness of this wasteland over the centuries. Each fort signified a separate, self-contained society, where everyone from the governor on down to the children lived: with boiling date syrup, sticky and scalding, literally at the ready to be poured down through the narrow slits onto invaders. Thus, the desert was not simply an empty, impenetrable terrain that could be conquered only by a railroad, as Curzon suggests. Rather, it was sparsely but critically populated by nomadic tribes. Yet, lacking an urban focal point where a settled civilization could take root and thus provide political stability, it was also a landscape of anarchy.

The liberalizing influence of the ocean never truly penetrated into such a chaotic hinterland. Indeed, the deeper and broader the desert, potentially the more unstable and violent the state. The states of the African Sahel have been the starkest examples of this worldwide, and for long periods this was the story of Oman.
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So what has allowed Oman to emerge from decades and centuries of instability—the wages of its violent, desert hinterland—to become a stable and durable pro-Western state with its own highly trained navy deployed astride the all-important Gulf of Hormuz? And what can we learn from this that is applicable to the entire Indian Ocean region?

A number of factors feed into Oman’s present cohesion as a state. It has a population of less than three million. That, combined with significant oil and natural gas reserves, has enabled the building of roads and other infrastructure enhancing the role of central government. This is in stark contrast to neighboring Yemen, which has a population of twenty-two million in a similar amount of territory, and is far more riven by mountains. Yemen is a much weaker polity, its central government has difficulty accessing vast reaches of the country, and must keep peace through a fragile balance of tribal relations, since no one tribe or sect has been able to establish an identity for the Yemeni state. The unsettling aspect of Yemen is the diffusion of power rather than the concentration of it. Since antiquity, the Wadi Hadhramaut, a hundred-mile-long oasis in southeastern Yemen surrounded by great tracts of desert and stony plateau, has maintained, through caravan routes and Arabian Sea ports, closer relations with India and Indonesia than with other parts of Yemen.
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Unlike Oman, Yemen has remained a vast, unruly assemblage of tribal kingdoms.

Moreover, Oman’s happy situation owes less to Western precepts of technology and democracy than to the reinvigoration of certain feudal practices and, relatedly, the unusual personal qualities of its absolute ruler, Sultan Qabus bin Sa‘id. In and of itself, Sultan Qabus’s Oman constitutes a rebuke to Washington notions of how the Middle East and the world should evolve. Oman shows how the path to progress in the non-Western world is indeed varied and at odds with some of the ideals of the liberal West and of the Enlightenment. It demonstrates, too, how individuals, as I learned throughout my travels about the Indian Ocean, determine history to the same degree as do seas and deserts: for good and for
bad. Sultan Qabus’s singular achievement has been to unite Oman’s two worlds: its Indian Ocean world and its Arabian desert one. Some historical background is in order.

Oman was unstable for long periods because although its official borders extend only around two hundred miles inland, such borders have been largely meaningless. In fact, its desert hinterland has extended much deeper, stretching into today’s Saudi Arabia and beyond. After the population of present-day Saudi Arabia itself, Oman was likely the first region in the Arab world whose people converted to Islam. But because Oman was located on the fringes of the Arabian desert, by the Indian Ocean, it became a refuge for dissidents, notably the Ibadis, the followers of Abd Allah bin Ibad, a seventh-century Kharijite teacher from Basra.

The Kharijites (from an Arab word meaning “to go out”) repudiated the religiously impure nature of the Islamic world’s first dynasty, that of the Damascus-based Omayyad caliphs, who relied on conquered non-Muslims for their administration. The Kharijites, who championed jihad against their enemies—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—represented the “most extreme form of tribal independence,” writes the scholar Bernard Lewis: “they refused to accept any authority not deriving from their own freely given and always revocable consent.”
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The Kharijite Ibadis of Oman rejected the hereditary Omayyad caliphs in favor of democratically elected imams. And yet these Ibadis were less fanatical than other Kharijites: they forbade the killing of other Muslims and were tolerant of non-Ibadis.
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Oman became a breeding ground for Ibadi missionaries, particularly after the collapse of the Omayyad caliphate in
A.D
. 750. However, the problem was that although Ibadi Islam united the interior of Oman by giving it a sectarian identity, it divided it in another sense; the democratic nature of the Ibadi imamate led to many bloody disputes. Rent by genealogy and political-religious factions, Oman’s two hundred–odd tribes fought continually among themselves in the desert, even as the coast prospered from Indian Ocean trade.